Carlos Manuel de Céspedes Quesada

Cuban politician, diplomat, and intellectual. Son of the father of the nation Carlos Manuel de Céspedes, he achieved the rank of colonel in the War of '95. He was provisional president of the Republic of Cuba from August 12, 1933 to September 4, 1933.

He was born on August 12, 1871 in New York, USA, along with his sister Gloria Dolores, at the moment when his father announced to his mother Ana de Quesada the capture of Pedro Céspedes, uncle of the newborns. He would never get to know his father.

He studied in the United States, Germany, and France, the latter country where he graduated as a bachelor and subsequently studied Diplomatic Law. After the outbreak of the War of Independence in 1895, he arrived in Cuba on the expedition of the Laureada, in October of that same year, and joined the Liberation Army, in which he achieved the rank of colonel.

He was chief of staff of the General Inspection of the mambí army and participated in the drafting of the Constitution of La Yaya, in 1897. He was a delegate to the assemblies of Representatives of Santa Cruz del Sur and El Cerro, and in this he opposed the removal of Máximo Gómez from his position as Commander-in-Chief of the Army, making public an eloquent proclamation in this regard.

Elected representative to the Chamber in 1902 and in 1905, he attempted to mediate during the liberal uprising of 1906, to prevent North American intervention. With the Republic restored in 1909, he was appointed minister to Italy, and subsequently exercised other diplomatic functions as plenipotentiary minister of Cuba in Argentina, the United States, France, the United Kingdom, and Mexico. He was Secretary of State on two occasions.

In 1915 he married Italian Laura Bertini y Alessandri and had two children with her, Carlos Manuel and Alba de Céspedes y Bertini.

When the overthrow of Gerardo Machado occurred, in August of 1933, he was appointed president of a government of "national concentration" with the participation of the political groups that had accepted the Mediation of North American ambassador Benjamin Sumner Welles, thus he became the seventh president of the Republic of Cuba.

The new government began its functions amid great revolutionary fervor, its brief administration suffered the consequences of the regime of chaos and confusion that the nation was experiencing after the fall of Machado, it dissolved Congress and abolished the constitutional reforms of 1928, restoring the Constitution of 1901. These provisions were not enough to satisfy the aspirations of many opposition organizations that considered Céspedes as a product of the Mediation, a continuation of the Machadato without Machado.

After the rumor spread that the government would carry out a substantial reduction of personnel and lower salaries, the atmosphere of insubordination increased until it provoked between September 3 and 4 the uprising of the sergeants, who occupied Columbia and proclaimed a military coup.

Carlos Manuel de Céspedes y Quesada was deposed on September 4, 1933 and withdrew from political life. He was appointed Academician of History and was author of various monographs and historiographical essays. He died in Havana, on March 28, 1939.